Mave
Active member
They all look like this now: https://forums.tms.sx/threads/main-character.44874/
What do I do? What's the course of action here?
What do I do? What's the course of action here?
XF 2.2 Proxied imgur images stopped working today
- Thread starter Mave
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Fullmental
Active member
Semi-related, is there a way to prevent users from linking imgur images using the img tags? We frankly don't want to deal with Imgur's shenanigans anymore, but we can't stop users from uploading to imgur of their own accord. There's an addon out there that does an automatic conversion but, like the built in image proxy, it no longer works with many hosting providers. We had to set up an HTTP proxy to a VPS host that was way out there in terms of popularity, just to get it to keep working for now and we're not confident it'll continue working long term.
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MattW
Well-known member
From some extensive work I did for a customer yesterday, it appears that they are indeed starting to block access from several well known hosting providers (so far, I've seen OVH, DigitalOcean, Hetzner impacted). As part of this, I ended up configuring squid proxy on a VPS server from a lesser known provider, which allowed the images to be fetched by @AndyB 's Convert Image All addon.
Following on from this, using @digitalpoint 's Cloudflare app addon and using Cloudflare workers for the image proxy still allows connectivity to Imgur (can't see them blocking access to Cloudflare!).
Following on from this, using @digitalpoint 's Cloudflare app addon and using Cloudflare workers for the image proxy still allows connectivity to Imgur (can't see them blocking access to Cloudflare!).
Fullmental
Active member
You can add Linode and Azure to that list as well. We've been using a proxy since the weekend too. A migration to cloudflare using digitalpoint's addon is in the works, but that'll be a lengthy process to get everything moved over. Hopefully we can keep the proxy alive until then... But even so I wouldn't put it past imgur to block even cloudflare if it suits them. They clearly don't care about their users and their use cases, or they wouldn't be doing this in the first place.
From our rack at our data center, pulling images was blocked, but likely not from their current mass kill. I suspect our entire (shared) data center was previously firewalled -- thousands of IPs.
Today we started pulling down onto a $10/month AWS virtual machine (U.S. East Coast). We ran a PHP script that did a search for i.imgur.com in posts and exported a text file image list. We copied the list to AWS, and then used a PHP script with wget (setting a user agent recommended, with wget redirects set to 0... a redirect means your file is gone) to rescue our images.
AWS worked great, and we finished tonight.
Late this afternoon, the same images disappeared when accessed from my desktop browser on my home cable modem. Yet they remain accessible from AWS.
It is worth nothing that according to Wikipedia imgur is (still?) hosted on AWS. Maybe somehow in-network AWS to AWS transfer is amongst the last to fall. Or maybe it is just a coincidence.
Note that many years ago we had our users agree in non-passive terms and conditions not to link to anything that they didn't have rights to, and also granting us permission to pull down and replace their links.
My point is... if you are out of options and still fretting, and have easy access to a vm on AWS, give it a try. It seems to be one of, if not the 'last man standing'. I'd do so pretty quickly though...
Photobucket and now this. I think I'm done allowing our users to link to external image hosting.
Today we started pulling down onto a $10/month AWS virtual machine (U.S. East Coast). We ran a PHP script that did a search for i.imgur.com in posts and exported a text file image list. We copied the list to AWS, and then used a PHP script with wget (setting a user agent recommended, with wget redirects set to 0... a redirect means your file is gone) to rescue our images.
AWS worked great, and we finished tonight.
Late this afternoon, the same images disappeared when accessed from my desktop browser on my home cable modem. Yet they remain accessible from AWS.
It is worth nothing that according to Wikipedia imgur is (still?) hosted on AWS. Maybe somehow in-network AWS to AWS transfer is amongst the last to fall. Or maybe it is just a coincidence.
Note that many years ago we had our users agree in non-passive terms and conditions not to link to anything that they didn't have rights to, and also granting us permission to pull down and replace their links.
My point is... if you are out of options and still fretting, and have easy access to a vm on AWS, give it a try. It seems to be one of, if not the 'last man standing'. I'd do so pretty quickly though...
Photobucket and now this. I think I'm done allowing our users to link to external image hosting.
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digitalpoint
Well-known member
FWIW, the way my addon does proxying, it's done with Cloudflare Workers, which are at the Cloudflare account level (not zone/domain level). Which means you could use Cloudflare for proxying images/unfurls even if you didn't have your domain "in" Cloudflare. So you would would need a Cloudflare account, but you could use the proxy functions even if your Cloudflare account had zero domains/zones in it... Anyway, just FYI...
Fullmental
Active member
I frankly don't trust any large entity to be unaffected long term. As of right now I have a vps proxy set up with some small company that's way under the radar, and as long as it works I'll continue using it. But really, the problem isn't going away. We'd much rather see a way to disable hotlinking to imgur entirely (maybe even just figure out a way to disable img tags entirely and switch to only attachments) than to keep chasing a moving target against a company that clearly wants nothing to do with our use cases.FWIW, the way my addon does proxying, it's done with Cloudflare Workers, which are at the Cloudflare account level (not zone/domain level). Which means you could use Cloudflare for proxying images/unfurls even if you didn't have your domain "in" Cloudflare. So you would would need a Cloudflare account, but you could use the proxy functions even if your Cloudflare account had zero domains/zones in it... Anyway, just FYI...
digitalpoint
Well-known member
Yep… only so much you can do if a company doesn’t want you hot linking/using their server resources.
DeltaHF
Well-known member
Fullmental
Active member
That doesn't prevent people from putting imgur links in image tags. It still lets them submit a post, and with the image convert addon by AndyB it still works to convert to an attachment. It's not a good solution. Users need giant bold warnings telling them what they're doing isn't allowed, not silent replacement strings. It also affects previous posts, which isn't good because we don't currently have a method to quickly replace all imgur images in a way that won't get our IP blocked almost immediately. At best that solution will lead to confusion and a lot of broken links for the sake of broken links.
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